


date

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M, arieto
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 04:29:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18403118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: “It’s better for us to leave no trace.”





	date

**Author's Note:**

> one for [oakyvii](http://kingkishou.tumblr.com/)'s birthday :')
> 
> and the 100th TG fic i've posted here! somehow!!! wow!!!!

One day, they plan out all the next year’s meetings in advance. Arima agrees readily to it, and when Eto begins listing off the dates he simply listens, and nods, and when she frowns at him and asks if he can really remember each one without taking notes, he simply repeats each date and time back to her.

“Don’t worry. I’ll remember,” he reassures her, misinterpreting her deepening frown, as usual.

“I’m not worrying,” Eto tells him. Sometimes the amount of empty space he has in that head of his just bewilders her.

“It’s better for us to leave no trace.”

“Don’t parrot me.”

It was her idea in the first place, to keep all correspondence between them face-to-face. There are only some times she feels something like “regret” about it — uncomfortable times — like when she has nothing to do but turn on the news to see if there’s any report on the Reaper. Or when Arima looks away from her to check a message on his dove-white device. Or when it’s one of the two-week stretches between their meetings, and she finds herself watching human girls on the subway smiling down dumbly at their phones.

Just this morning one of them had been right next to her, carefully filtering blurry photos: the morning sun, a dog, an unimpressive skyline, a plate of gleaming cooked meat, a dog again, a set of empty dishes, a dog again, a cake topped with fruit and candles, a dog again.

“Are those all the dates you have in mind?” Arima asks.

“No,” Eto says. And she tells him the last one.

:::

Of all of them, it’s the most unusual date. Her selections strategically avoided not only the usual predictable swells of CCG and ghoul activity, but also the  _other_  meetings, the secret ones.

“We have a meeting less than a week before that date,” Arima told her, to which she replied with a shrug.

“So? Are you busy on that day?”

“No,” Arima said. He added, for some reason, “Of course not.”

“I didn’t think so. Let’s meet then.”

So, they do.

It’s not the usual place. And it’s snowing. And it’s crowded, but Arima spots her easily, perched on one of the railings by the statue of a dog, and she slides down wordlessly when he arrives, and pats the snow off her skirt, her tights, her boots, her scarf, the faux fur lining of her sleeves and hood.

“I’ve never seen you wear so much clothing,” Arima remarks, because it is true, and her huff condenses into so huge a plume that her glasses fog. Frankly, until this moment it hadn’t even occurred to him that she owned this many garments.

“Hungry?” she asks.

“Is a restaurant an appropriate location?” he asks back.

“Depends.” She looks him up and down. “You like to eat meat, right? Probably? There’s no other way you can build all that muscle otherwise, right?”

“I do eat it.”

“Good.”

The place she leads him to is packed, but Eto smiles and chimes her name to an attendant — “ _Takatsuki_ ” — and they are led through the crowds to the rear, where the attendant removes the “Reserved” sign from a grill embedded in a small table. They sit. Around them people are chatting, yelling, laughing raucously.

“It’s too loud to talk,” Arima says, and by the third time he says it Eto hears it well enough to say “Then don’t.” She peruses the menu, which is yellowed and sticky.

“Do any of these stand out?”

“Stand out?”

“Do you want one more than the others?”

He looks down. He flips the menu over and over, but both sides just seem to list of different types of meat. “I don’t know enough to make a decision,” he says.

“Let’s just do the special then.”

The platter comes out not too long later, with a couple of beers, which Eto ordered after surreptitiously glancing at the other tables. The special contains several varieties of meat which to him all look pretty much the same. The attendant sets a flame into the grill and leaves.

“Alright,” Eto says. “Go ahead.”

“Go…ahead? And cook it?”

“Sure. Unless you want to eat it raw.”

“Can we?”

“We probably shouldn’t.”

They look at the platter.

“I’ve never done this before,” Arima says.

“Well…” Eto reaches for a pair of metal chopsticks, straightens them against her palm with a grimace. “It can’t be that hard, right?”

:::

It is. It’s only about halfway through that they get the hang of it, sort of, which he would like to think is admirable progression given the almost-immediate realization that neither of them have really cooked anything quite like this in their lives. Eto laughs when she realizes it.

“Stupid,” she says. “I didn’t even think it was possible the god of the CCG wouldn’t even know how to cook himself a meal.”

“Do  _you_?” he asks. and then, before she can reply — “That one’s done, remove it!”

“Is it? It doesn’t look done.”

“The ones of that size appear to be finished after a minute and forty-two seconds,” Arima explains hastily, but of course by the time he finishes saying it a minute and forty-nine seconds have elapsed, and Eto has to saw the black parts off with a chopstick before she pops the piece into her mouth, triumphant, and suppressing a cringe at the heat.

They manage to eat about a good amount of meat that way, yanking it in panic the moment the edges start to blacken; and the rest, the charred bits, they attempt to gnaw and then decide to dispose of quietly in the coals when the waitress isn’t looking. They nurse each belligerent spitting piece down until it looks like they’ve devoured most of their meal, rather than just half.

“It probably would have just tasted better raw,” Eto sighs, when she counts out money for the bill. But it’s nice, really, that it was warm. He barely feels the cold when they gather their coats and exit, the sun set now, and the falling snow turned golden and red by the city lights. Suddenly, he remembers, with a blink. For a while — in that room, in the clamor, in the heady bitterness of soot and alcohol in his mouth, in the strange but casual focus on grilling — he’d…forgotten.

He straightens his coat.

“Are you ready to talk now?”

“Almost. There was only one thing I wanted to talk about anyway.”

They return to her apartment, where Eto immediately sloughs off the majority of her clothes. Arima picks up her coat from the entryway and shakes the melted droplets of snow from it before removing his own coat and shoes and picking his way inside. They meet here rarely, but whenever they do, Eto always visits her fridge for a snack. He’s surprised to see her still open the fridge door even after eating another meal, and is surprised further when what she withdraws isn’t a plastic container, but instead a white cardboard box.

She clears a spot on her kotatsu, and gestures for him to sit. He tucks his knees beneath the slowly heating blanket and watches as she turns the box toward him and gingerly opens it. It’s a cake, topped with out/of-season strawberries, and a placard on it made of chocolate. He recognizes her handwriting from her autographs, and from the crookedness he would expect from someone who has written a lot of things, but not with frosting.

It reads, messily:  _Happy birthday._

She lights candles. He stares at it.

“You have to blow them out,” Eto says, and he replies, “I know.”

“Are you thinking of a wish?” she asks, with a snort.

“No,” he says. “I’m just looking at it.”

“It’s very nice,” he says, after a while.

Eto moves herself beneath the blanket as well. The table is so small that their knees touch. She pulls the covers up to her shoulders, and sighs.

“Too bad we can’t take a picture of it.”

“It’s not necessary,” Arima tells her. “I’ll remember.”

And he blows the candles out.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!


End file.
